Letters of Love and War : A World War II Correspondence

Letters of Love and War, a correspondence between an army surgeon and his wife, capture both the battlefront as well as the day-to-day experiences of a central New York family waiting for a husband and father to return home. Dr. Sydney Stringer's letters from North Africa, Italy, France, and Germany offer glimpses of the horrors of war as he saw them. They are invaluable documents describing World War II from the perspective of a surgeon in an evacuation hospital as it moves behind the battle lines. Stringer describes the changing scenes of postwar France and Germany, interprets the ordinary soldier's reaction to seeing prisoner-of-war stockades and concentration camps, and how troops responded to Churchill's announcement that the war had ended. The letters of Helen Dann Stringer reveal a personal, yet universal saga of the war from the homefront. Warm and lively, her letters of encouragement reveal changing scenes as she describes life with family, friends, and their four young children in what seemed to her an unending homefront war without men.